The efficient movement, storage, and control of items is more important than ever. Advances in communicating orders for items have led to increased expectations as to the promptness in which these orders are fulfilled. Various suppliers, merchants, distributors, or other conveyors of goods, may operate materials handling facilities to store and move items to satisfy received orders as part of a fulfillment network. For example, electronic marketplaces, such as those accessible via the Internet, may include a catalog of items or products available for purchase. These items may be offered as the basis for commerce (e.g., sale or trade). Customers may utilize a web browser to visit a merchant's website, select an item for purchase from the catalog, and engage in a checkout process to finalize an order for the item. The merchant may operate a fulfillment network including various materials handling facilities in order to process such orders, such as a facility that maintains an inventory of items, picks the ordered item from inventory, and prepares shipments of the purchased item. A shipment carrier may acquire such shipments from the merchant and deliver the shipments to the respective purchasing customers.
Improvements to materials handling systems have increased the throughput in which items may be processed at materials handling facilities. For instance, automation techniques for processes such as storing and retrieving items from inventory, as well as conveying items within a materials handling facility, may improve the performance of these processes. Some processes, however, are less susceptible to improvements like automation. Consider processes with manually performed or assisted tasks; performance of the process may be limited to the capabilities of a human agent performing the respective task. As the capabilities of different human agents may vary widely, processes with manually performed or assisted tasks can be subject to inconsistent performance. When combined with processes operating with improved performance characteristics, like the aforementioned automation techniques, processes with manually performed or assisted tasks may reduce the overall effectiveness of such techniques.
While embodiments are described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that the embodiments are not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include”, “including”, and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.